A Victory for Commonsense
Josepine Bartosch does not mince her words!!
Ultimately, the allegations about Henderson’s behaviour should be beside the point. Nor should the nurses ever have been required to parade personal trauma to justify not wanting to change in front of a man. Single-sex spaces exist not because women are prudes, but because a minority of men are predators. This was acknowledged by the tribunal, which found that compelling women to change in front of a biological male “violated their dignity … by failing to respect their personal bodily privacy and sense of dignity” and was likely to cause “fear, distress and/or humiliation”. What the tribunal did not say is the more direct and impolite truth: whether he sports frilly knickers or knackered boxer shorts, a man who insists on forcing his way into women’s space is not challenging stereotypes; he is identifying himself as a risk.
Predictably, this judicial recalibration in favour of women’s rights provoked outrage among those who boast of being on the right side of history. The “anti-establishment” tax lawyer Jolyon Maugham KC whined that the ruling “demonstrates pretty clearly that whatever else the Supreme Court delivered it did not deliver clarity.” Meanwhile, former presenter India Willoughby stamped his size 10s, claiming that “the equivalent of playground mean girl terfs are championed by a UK court — who say THEIR dignity was violated by being near a woman who is trans”, before insisting that it was in fact the women who had been “doing the harassing and being vile”.
To such trans supremacists, anything short of women’s total capitulation to men’s demands is intolerable. It does not trouble them if women are pushed out of public space, forced to relive sexual trauma, or made to spend their working lives fearful and humiliated. In this they have been ably assisted by legions of human resources professionals and managers, for whom women’s safety is, at best, an inconvenience and, at worst, acceptable collateral in the gender jihad.
